Human Rights Watch (HRW)

June 18, 2018

Introduction

Human Rights Watch is a powerful NGO, with a massive budget, close links to Western governments, and significant influence in international institutions. Its publications reflect the absence of professional standards, research methodologies, and military and legal expertise, as well as a deep-seated ideological bias against Israel.

Claims to “accept no government funds, directly or indirectly.” Following criticism from NGO Monitor over massive support from Oxfam Novib, which receives the vast majority of its budget from the Dutch government, HRW added language to its website, saying: “we accept no government funds from these foundations, only privately sourced revenues.” This assertion cannot be independently verified.

In 2009, HRW held a fundraising dinner in Saudi Arabia, using HRW’s anti-Israel bias and the specter of “pro-Israel pressure groups” to solicit funds from “prominent members of Saudi society.” At the event, Sarah Leah Whitson, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division, boasted that HRW allegations of human rights violations were instrumental in the discredited Goldstone “investigation” of the 2009 Gaza conflict.

Activities

Systematic NGO Monitor analysesdemonstrate that HRW disproportionately focuses on condemnations of Israel and that publications related to Israel often lack credibility. HRW also promotes an agenda based solely on the Palestinian narrative of victimization and Israeli aggression.

Promotes a Palestinian “right of return,” which, if implemented, would effectually mean the elimination of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.

Lobbies the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other international frameworks, promoting false, distorted, and unverifiable allegations against Israel. Played a major role in the creation of the eventually discredited Goldstone report, submitting numerous statements to the commission equating Israel to Hamas and falsely accusing Israel of “willfully” killing civilians.

Shakir spoke at a hearing in Congress on June 8, 2017 on “how persistent human rights violations, systematic impunity, discrimination and a hyper-militarized environment affect the lives of the Palestinian children growing up under a military occupation with no end in sight.” The event was sponsored by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as part of their “No Way to Treat a Child” campaign; both DCI-P and AFSC promote BDS campaigns against Israel.

On June 4, 2017, HRW released a statement on “50 Years of Occupation Abuses” accusing Israel of “major violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law” and “war crimes.” The statement further calls upon the International Criminal Court to “open a formal investigation into serious crimes committed in Israel and Palestine.” (Omar Shakir also posted the report in video form on Twitter.)

In 2015, there was a concerted but failed NGO campaign, led by HRW, to include the Israeli army on the list.

In December 2010, HRW published a report, “Separate and Unequal,” accusing Israel of discriminating against Palestinians in the West Bank on the “basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin” and advancing a BDS agenda.

HRW was an active participant in the 2001 Durban conference, which crystallized the strategy of delegitimizing Israel as “an apartheid regime” through international isolation based on the South African model.

BDS Activities

HRW initiated a failed public campaign with alongside Palestinian efforts, calling on FIFA to take punitive measures against Israel and “require the IFA to stop holding games inside the settlements and to stop allowing fields and halls in the settlements to be used for official competitions.” The campaign included multiple articles, extensive social media posts, and lobbying of the UN.

On June 13, 2018, HRW issued a press statement accusing Israel of “apparent war crimes in Gaza” during the Great March of Return. The statement demanded that “Third countries should impose targeted sanctions” against senior Israeli officials (emphasis added).

On September 12, 2017, HRW published a report on “Israeli Law and Banking in West Bank Settlements,” calling for banks “to comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities,” as by “providing services to and in settlements, which are illegal under international humanitarian law (IHL), and partnering with developers in new construction projects, Israeli banks are making existing settlements more sustainable, enabling the expansion of their built-up area and the take-over of Palestinian land, and furthering the de facto annexation of the territory.”

According to Sari Bashi, HRW Israel/Palestine Advocacy Director, “There are many, many steps banks can and should take to at the very least reduce their involvement in settlements, if not stop it entirely…If they choose not to take steps, institutional investors who care about their own human rights activity should take action.”

In November 2017, HRW issued a press release applauding the database for “build[ing] pressure on businesses.”

On January 19, 2016, published “Occupation Inc.” a 162-page report calling for businesses to cease operations in Israeli West Bank settlements, constituting a de-facto call for a boycott of Israel. Coinciding with HRW’s publication, Kathleen Peratis, co-chair of HRW’s Middle East North Africa Advisory Committee and emerita Board of Trustees member, penned a pro-BDS article in Ha’aretz.

Criticism from Founder

Due to the organization’s failures, founder Robert Bernstein published an article in the New York Times (“Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” October 19, 2009) strongly criticizing the organization for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israel bias, and for “issuing reports…that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

Bernstein expanded on these ideas in a lecture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (November 2010), noting, “Human Rights Watch’s attacks on almost every issue [have] become more and more hostile [toward Israel].”

In July 2006, in responding to a critique of HRW’s reporting of the Lebanon War, Roth stated: “An eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law…” The New York Sundecried this statement as a “slur on the Jewish religion itself that is breathtaking in its ignorance… To suggest that Judaism is a ‘primitive’ religion incompatible with contemporary morality is to engage in supersessionism, the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much antisemitism.”

In October 2016, HRW hired Omar Shakir to serve as its “Israel and Palestine Country Director.” Shakir is a consistent supporter of a one-state framework and advocate for BDS campaigns against Israel. In February 2017, Shakir was denied a work visa by the Israeli government, but was ultimately allowed into Israel in April 2017.

In 2009, Sarah Leah Whitson, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division, visited Libya, claiming to have discovered a “Tripoli spring.” She praised Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Islam as a leading reformer and for creating an “expanded space for discussion and debate.”

Whitson published a 2011 op-ed on The Huffington Post, “A Matter of Civil Rights,” abusing the legacy of the US Civil Rights Movement to single-out and advance hatred towards Israel. In the op-ed, Whitson maintained: “We do no honor to [Dr. Martin Luther] King’s legacy by supporting policies that promote racial discrimination and segregation.” Whitson also employed racial stereotyping in race-baiting American Jews, stating: “And why should American Jews, who have a history of deep engagement with the U.S. civil rights movement, support settlements built on these kinds of laws and policies in Israel?”

In 2011, Kathleen Peratis, co-chair of the Advisory Committee of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division, visited Gaza and met with several Hamas officials. Hamas is a designated terror organization by Israel, the U.S., EU, and Canada. In her article about the visit, Peratis describes her experience exploring smuggling tunnels from Gaza into Egypt with members of Hamas.

On May 28, 2018, Human Rights Watch issued yet another publication targeting Israeli banks. These materials are part of HRW’s continuing role in a broader BDS campaign to damage Israel’s economy through the financial sector.

HRW was one of a number of NGOs that set the agenda for a Policy Note published by Watchlist, urging the UN Secretary General to add Israel to the list of "parties known to commit grave violations against children." The publication lacks methodology and evidence, and promotes impunity for Palestinian terror groups.

HRW's statement on two Israelis who crossed into Gaza and are being held incommunicado by Hamas contains many of the general methodological problems that plague HRW’s publications, relating to timeliness, value-added “research,” sustained campaigning, consistency of terminology, and promotion of political ideology rather than human rights standards. It also highlights HRW’s ongoing failures in its agenda related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

While the lack of rights and fundamental freedom for women is one of the most egregious manifestations of autocratic and oppressive regimes in the Middle East, prominent human rights NGOs fail to direct sustained attention to womens rights in this area of the world.